To use FixIts you boil the kettle and simply heat a stick in a mug of water. Once it’s flexible and soft at 62 degrees Celsius, you can mould it into any shape onto other products or create your own products.

Once hardened FixIts can be drilled, sanded and cut. The eco-friendly material can be reheated, reused and remoulded or composted if you don’t need it anymore.

FixIts are the brainchild of materials guru and designer, Chris Lefteri. Based in London, Chris Lefteri Design is a renowned material-led design studio working to close the gap between the material industries and the design community.

“Our studio is filled with hundreds of material samples and we have ideas all the time for where these can be used. What was different about this material was that it wasn’t an innovation in terms of a new application but about developing a new story for it,” says Lefteri.

“The idea for FixIts started about five years ago when my wife started using it to fix things around the house. We both realised that the material had much more mileage as a consumer product,” he explains.

In order to turn a material used in industrial and hobbyist applications, into a product that could be used in the home, office (or anywhere else) it really needed a new story to support it.

Through a chance encounter with a former student and now partner Forrest Radford, Lefteri started to open up what this story was going to be.

“The material was a solution without a problem. Generally only experts understand problems, but what I wanted to have was a product that was going to tick the two boxes of both useful and desirable,” Lefteri says.

“I wanted the product, to be at home in your kitchen drawer,” he says.

Lefteri and Radford played with lots of different profiles and sizes but settled on a simple stick shape that felt familiar, a bit like an ice-cream stick, but with a ‘handy’ quality.

“Because the material needed to be heated by dipping into hot water, a stick was a practical shape,” he says.

FixIts is made from a plastic that softens at a much lower temperature than conventional plastics and exploits the main property of thermoplastics. They can be repeatedly heated, cooled and heated again.

Not only does this render FixIts reusable, but the plastic itself is also compostable in accordance with requirements for EN-14995. Lefteri and Radford launched FixIts on Kickstarter this week.